The ancient Greek play “Antigone” by Sophocles warns that “no one loves the messenger who brings bad news” and “no man delights in the bearer of bad news.”
About 1,900 years later, Lewis Carroll contributed another spin on the ill-tempered response to disappointment with the Queen of Hearts in his 1865 classic Alice in Wonderland. “Off with their heads!” she would exclaim, whenever a subject provided information that displeased her.
In the 20th century, George Orwell delivered another version in his prescient masterwork 1984: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
And so we come to August 2025 and President Donald Trump’s disturbing dismissal of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, immediately after the release of a negative jobs report. On social media, Trump claimed without evidence that the commissioner “faked the Jobs Numbers.” He went on to say, “I’ve had issues with the numbers for a long time. We’re doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony like they were before the election, and there were other times. So I fired her, and I did the right thing.”
In short, is this Trump’s “Queen of Hearts” moment, or something more?
The Russian example
It’s difficult to look beyond Trump’s longstanding admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As we’ve documented in the past, Putin has a history of rewriting inconvenient narratives. Rosstat, the nation’s official statistics agency, has a longstanding record of manipulating economic data to please Putin. It goes to great lengths to amend poor figures and hide unflattering statistics under pressure from the Kremlin, especially since Putin’s Ukraine invasion in 2022. The Russian agency has been “switching to new methodologies” and “recalculating data” with alarming frequency. Then there’s the overt political interference—Putin has fired the heads of Rosstat, transferred control of the agency to political appointees, and appointed a blatant political pick as deputy economic minister.
It is no wonder outside observers ranging from international organizations to foreign investors regularly sound alarms over “concerns about the reliability and consistency of the Kremlin’s economic releases.” Putin now refuses to disclose major economic indicators ranging from foreign trade data, monthly output data on oil and gas, capital inflows and outflows, financial statements of major companies, central bank monetary base data, foreign direct investment data, domestic value added by industry, and lending and loan origination data. Even Rosaviatsiya, Russia’s federal air transport agency, has stopped publishing data on air passenger volumes.
Yet these are the major high-frequency flow statistics that go into the construction of an economy-wide GDP forecast for any nation—from the U.S. to China. Since the outbreak of war, the IMF has apparently allowed Russia to violate its membership standards—which require member states to disclose transparent, verifiable, and comprehensive national income statistics. Free markets cannot function without trusted information. That’s why foreign direct investment into Russia has plummeted from over $100 billion to zero, and capital markets activity has been virtually frozen over, with barely any IPOs and little global interest in Russian securities.
Not just Russia
Of course, China is little better. Official Chinese statistics have become so widely recognized as manipulated and baseless that analysts rely on a wide range of unofficial or proxy indicators to gauge the true state of the Chinese economy. These shadow measures span everything from satellite imagery to nightlife activity to measuring pollution out of smokestacks.
Even China’s top economic official, Premier Le Keqiang, secretly confided that he didn’t believe the official GDP numbers, instead preferring to monitor rail freight volumes, electricity consumption, and bank loans disbursed.
Similarly, in 2022, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan proceeded to fire a series of senior economic officials who questioned his unconventional policy of cutting interest rates to fight inflation and spur an economic revival simultaneously. The most consequential action by Erdoğan was his eventual removal of Sait Dincer, head of the Turkish Statistical Institute, after the bureau reported a surge in inflation of 36% year-over-year. The Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association jointly condemned the president’s “political interference in the production of official statistics,” urging him to allow the statistical institute “to produce objective statistical information,” an essential function “to ensure a healthy democracy in Turkey and to maintain international credibility in its statistics.”
In Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro has reportedly detained over a dozen economists and consultants in recent months in an attempt to suppress any suggestions of a worsening financial crisis in his country.
Off with her head!
But this is America, it’s supposed to be different. Trump’s abrupt firing of McEntarfer surprised market analysts and economists of all political backgrounds.
Most recently, on CNBC, Elaine Chao, a longtime Republican and former Trump cabinet official (she served as Labor Secretary for eight years under George W. Bush and served as transportation secretary in Trump’s first administration) directly disputed the president’s accusations. Chao told the audience: “It is very, very difficult to tamper or to interfere with these numbers. BLS is very concerned about the security of these numbers … if anything were to be awry … one of these 40 people [conducting] the final analysis would have spoken up. So, it’s highly unlikely.”
Former BLS Commissioner William Beach, another Trump appointee, posted on social media soon after McEntarfer’s firing on Friday, calling it a “totally groundless” decision that “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau.” Beach further criticized the president’s move on Sunday, saying his action “undermines credibility” of the agency.
Trump has a (small) point when he claims that BLS performance has been slipping. Concerns about the timeliness and accuracy of BLS data are longstanding, with major revisions occurring only months later. The BLS and other statistical agencies have acknowledged the need to modernize their methodology, but progress has been slow. After COVID-19 disruptions, the extent of job revisions has swung more widely than in the past, notwithstanding attempts to improve their methodologies. The recent downward revision on Friday, subtracting over 250,000 jobs, is the largest since the peak of the pandemic.
However, Trump’s accusations that the BLS faked job numbers to weaken his credibility and that of his Republican supporters highlight his tendency to distort facts. His apparently impulsive decision to fire McEntarfer, on a baseless belief that BLS revisions were politically motivated, recalls so many literary depictions of authoritarianism.
Revisions are a standard part of the BLS process, essential for improving the accuracy of the U.S. economy’s picture as new data arrives. Since 2003, the average revision has been around 51,000 jobs, not an insignificant figure in its own right. Despite claims that may suggest otherwise, Trump’s tariff policies have introduced an unprecedented level of uncertainty into the U.S. economy—comparable only to 2020—with many economists anticipating a recession as a consequence. Bloomberg has convincingly suggested a possible link between the magnitude of negative job revisions and recessionary conditions.
Just as leading businesses worldwide have worked to navigate the uncertainties caused by the president’s economic policies, should we expect different outcomes from a government agency that has also faced hiring restrictions and resource cuts due to arbitrary DOGE-led initiatives? Additionally, the Trump administration’s decision to disband the Federal Statistics Advisory Committee in March removed a vital mechanism for improving agency performance, including the modernization of data collection, tabulation, and analysis. While concerns about BLS methods, such as the dependence on enumerators instead of scanner data, are valid and merit attention, this is not the proper way to address them.
This is far from the first time Trump has subordinated statistical integrity to political theater. Other infamous examples include how, after Trump mistakenly asserted there would be a “95% chance” that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama, he insisted on showing doctored hurricane maps with a Sharpie-drawn track over Alabama, in plain contradiction of NOAA forecasts. Or there was the time when Trump demanded Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find me 11,000 votes”, insisting he won the 2020 presidential election and firing his own deputies such as Bill Barr and Chris Krebs who refused to go along with his election denialism.
More recently, in April 2025, Trump announced “reciprocal” tariffs on Liberation Day based not on actual reciprocal trade barriers but rather from a misleading formula based on trade deficits, leading economists to declare Trump’s numbers were “made-up” and “erroneous.” Finally, there has been Trump’s routine inflation of the crowd size at his rallies, and demands that his subordinates claim his first inauguration was the most attended in history, contradicting factual data across Nielsen ratings, livestream numbers, and Metro ridership showing far fewer attended his inauguration than Barack Obama’s inauguration, with Kellyanne Conway citing “alternative facts.” Look to literature. Strongmen out of George Orwell or Lewis Carroll don’t fire back with facts; they fire the truth-tellers.
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